The Kin of Mandalore
by Kudzu1
Summary: It is a difficult mission that has finally all come down to this, this one palpable moment that could make or break one life or many in more ways than can be known. What has Spar, the rogue ARC trooper, the selfproclaimed Mandalore, come to?


The Kin of Mandalore  
By Kudzu

"_Your bodyguard - that's what I am and what I'll deserve to be, in many more ways than you can know at present"  
_Ragnar Danneskjöld, _Atlas Shrugged_

Decked out in a heavy, full set of Mandalorian armor, he stepped through the threshold and into the office. The door slid shut behind him.

And, just like that, there was Spar, the renegade, the Mandalore, seated at a ravaged-looking desk before him. Trophies and prizes were mounted on the walls and the shelves around him. But there he was, just sitting there, wearing a jumpsuit stamped with the fanged-skull crest of the Mandalorian clan. His mission had brought him to this moment. The endpoint of it sat before him.

He drew his blaster rifle, steeling himself to the completion of this long, arduous search, the one that should have been another's but had instead been entrusted only to him. This was the moment that months had culminated in, right here.

Yet the face he saw belonged to someone he knew too well. It was not just his face, or the face of millions upon millions of other men, or the face of Jango Fett who had come before this relaxed rogue here, but _Spar's_ face. He froze, finger on the trigger, in the millisecond before the life would have been blasted from his calm victim's body and his mission would have been accomplished at last.

Spar spoke. "Am I to know the identity of my assassin?" His voice was more cultured than he remembered it, yet at the same time it was rougher, more violent, more threatening. It was as if his voice represented a sinewy, strong animal with a pleasant exterior and a calm demeanor, yet muscles rippled and flexed beneath its smooth, shiny skin, and one knew that if it should be provoked, the provoker would face the consequences of its supple strength.

He identified himself as he had been drilled to do, as Spar had been drilled to do, as all of them had been drilled to do since birth: "Alpha Zero-One, 'Cygnus', Advance Recon Commando of the Grand Army of the Republic. Rank of Captain."

"Alpha Zero-Two, 'Spar', leader of the Mandalorian clans. Rank of Mandalore." Spar offered a mock salute, and Cygnus damned himself for not pulling the trigger right there to blow him away. Yet even as he hated his weakness, he could not find the strength to commit the impersonal murder or to bring the due justice of a traitor and a deserter to their kind and to the Republic.

He looked at Cygnus impassively. "I'd wondered if it was you," he said. "It's been a long time in coming, I must say. But here you are, alone with me, in a locked, soundproof personal chamber that I don't permit the surveillance of."

The glimmer of a blaster muzzle came into view, peeking up from beneath the edge of the desk; Cygnus swore wordlessly for neglecting to take note that Spar's hands were beneath the table. But he was still the one wearing the suit of Mandalorian armor, while Spar was dressed only in a jumpsuit over which it could be fitted.

"My mission here," he said steadily, "is to neutralize you as a threat to the security of the Republic and its people."

"Oh, ridiculous!" Spar exploded. "I'm not hearing that manufactured bantha poodoo from you. You know why you're here, _tat_ Cygnus. You're here for revenge. You're here because I left the ranks of the Republic in its imaginary time of need."

He held the snub-nosed rifle still. "You will return and face prosecution or be brought to justice right here, by me."

He laughed. "Justice?" he scoffed. "Justice for what? Following in the footsteps of Jango Fett, who was bested by your vaunted Jedi? Achieving a greater glory and power than I could ever have as some anonymous, faceless foot soldier of a galactic army? Embracing the destiny bred into me as a son of the Mandalorians? Look at what I am now! I am the leader of a civilization that has endured for generations, for as long as your Republic! I'm not an ARC trooper or any kind of soldier without a free will and a face; I am _the_ face of a power that I will see rise again. I've become _Human_." He laughed again; the noise was harsh and held only a bitter trace of ironic humor. "And your people consider me deranged."

"These are delusions of grandeur," said Cygnus, trying to shunt the truths (_lies_) of his wayward brother from his mind. "You have abandoned your true destiny. What you described is a fate that we were never offered. It is not yours to take."

"But," Spar smiled, "isn't it? This option wasn't placed before me. I _took_ it. I _seized_ my own future, placed it into my own hands, and molded a new reality for me, closer to the heart than to the collective mind. Anyone can be a kreetle scurrying without brains to the bidding of the collective. It takes only obedience to others and such simultaneous disloyalty to self, the spirit that thirsts to be free to pursue its own meaning of existence, to achieve that. It's a contradiction. Anyone can see that. To live for others to the point of denying one's own self is the height of folly."

"You are a clone trooper!" Cygnus cried, his horror at seeing the enormity of what his brother had become superseding all of his doubts and misgivings, swamping out all else; his finger tensed on the trigger of his weapon, and he hoped impossibly for its bolts to just take the evil disguising itself as liberty or as ambition or as both out of Spar's body, for them to restore him to the straight-shooting soldier that he once was, back in the lifetime in which Cygnus had known him.

Again, Spar smiled. "I _was_ a clone trooper," he corrected simply, placing an understated but still clear stress on the second word.

"A clone trooper is always a clone trooper," he retorted desperately. "You cannot change genetics."

Again, he laughed. "I don't want to change genetics! But I can defy the artificial ordering of my destiny. I can deny the higher power that programs me like a droid and decides my fate for me."

Cygnus shook his head. "No, Spar," he said. "Your fate is your own. Your fate has always been your own. If you fight, and fight well, you do not die. Victory is life for us, Spar. You and I, all our brothers, all the GAR."

"And that has not changed."

"There is victory in service. You win that battle, Spar, and you can move on to win the next."

"Then, by your definition, I have chosen defeat." The end of the blaster on Spar's desk was still aimed up at him, but it still did not bid to extinguish Cygnus as he wanted to extinguish the selfishness of Spar.

He groaned, a sound of frustration and despair, a sound in response not just to Spar, but also to himself and his own shortcomings now, in this crucial moment after crucial moments that he'd already allowed to slip away. And this one went just the same way.

"How could you have fallen to this?" he demanded, placing his other hand along the stock of the rifle to steady it. Was it shaking because his arm muscles were giving out from holding and aiming it one-handedly for these minutes already? That was the answer. It had to be. There were no alternatives.

"I have not fallen," Spar answered with a gleam in his eye that Cygnus fervently wished that he had seen before in the eyes of himself in the mirror or of his brothers - but he had not. This was a spark of youth, of rebellion, of defiance that Cygnus had thought he had known in his contempt for the lesser ranks, but perhaps never had known at all.

"You always took pride in your free will," he continued, seeming to see through his former brethren's appropriated iron helmet and straight past into his mind or his soul, if he had one at all, if anyone had one at all. "We all held that trait, that unadulterated Jango Fett himself, as our right to superiority. That was what made us better than those 'faceless' grunts, the other clones of the rank-and-file. But have you ever exercised that independence of mind and soul?"

"There is no soul!" he burst out angrily.

Spar shook his head, smiled again as if he knew a secret that Cygnus had never been privy to. "If there is no such thing as the soul, then you would be still fighting, or dead, on the front lines, and I with you." He seemed to pull his vision back from whatever he could see inside of the Republic soldier and to focus on his eyes that he still could not see. "How do you think I broke away? Every cog in my mind would say that I'm only to do what I've been brought up and instructed to do."

"Your mind has _broken_, Spar."

He shrugged, at last seeming to concede or admit this. "Maybe. It's difficult to tell insanity from my point of view. But if that's what sets me free from the chains of someone else's army, so be it. You know what I think the insanity is?" he asked, leaning forward; the silver of the blaster muzzle did not vanish beneath his body as he did so, but still winked its maybe-impotent menace at A-01 "Cygnus". He said, when the other did not answer, "I think that the insanity is living, fighting, and dying for someone who you've only been told to live, fight, and die for. You've been told to feel identity with the Republic, and so you pretend yourself to feel it."

Cygnus knew that he had to stop hearing these things. He could not bear to think that they could affect him, but nor could he bear to think that he could stand by and allow them to be uttered - especially by one who had once been his brother.

Who was _still_ his brother, he realized, looking into the prideful eyes of A-02 "Spar", the man who called himself Mandalore but was still an ARC trooper inside himself.

He was, wasn't he? He could not destroy his true being. He could just suppress it and deny it the chance to resurge and reclaim the vessel of his clone body, for great justice.

"Do you wish to shoot and kill me?" Spar asked. He shrugged. "So be it. My personal ideal will die with me. The concept of soul, the liberator, will endure forever. It's an eternal torch that no one can hide or snuff out. You can't blind the light of a quasar."

Yes, he _had_ to pull this trigger, watch Spar jerk back, watch his smoking body collapse in his chair, watch the last vestige of breath dribble out of his mouth. It had to be done. Justice had to be served. His mission had to be accomplished.

But he did not want to. He realized that he _could not_. Perhaps Spar was deranged. Perhaps he had fallen victim to clone madness. His words were neither those of a rational being nor those of an Advance Recon Commando.

This inalienable truth endured, though: Spar was his brother.

How could they, his masters, his Republic, have sent him on a mission to seek out and kill his own brother, the one he'd grown up with and trained with, the one closer in not just numerical value but spirit to him than any other? He could fulfill it, mathematically speaking. He had the ability well within him to pull that trigger, to shoot and watch Spar die. But he could not do it. He could not murder his brother, despite all of his misguided ambition and delusions - those were the labels that his mind had assigned to Spar's ideas - and despite his treachery to the Republic and to his own destiny.

How had he cheated fate? How had he broken loose of order to favor chaos? How had he disobeyed?

It began here, in Cygnus's lowering of the rifle he clutched now in both gauntleted hands. It began in the _soul_ that could not be assigned chains or sliced by any energy-lash. It began in the unfettered allegiance to one blood, one life, one being: the one that they were the legacy to.

He did not care which of them Jango Fett would be prouder of, if he could still see them today. He had his own destiny as an ARC trooper, fighting the good fight for the Galactic Republic and its citizens. Spar had shared that destiny once, but now they had diverged. Now Spar had a new destiny, whether in cosmic truth or in the sufficiency of his own spirit. Cygnus had to admit that. But it was not his path. But it was not to be his path. It was a path that only one could have taken, and Spar willed it to be his. Cygnus did not want it. He was content in deathless service. That was his way.

"I will not kill you, _tat_," he said. _Brother_ - he spoke the word in the dialect of Concord Dawn, where Jango Fett had hailed from. "But nor will I join you."

Nothing perceptible changed in Spar's face. He nodded acceptance. "You deny freedom of your own free will," he said. "But see? You have it. You can exercise it. You can _break free_."

"I do not wish it," said Cygnus, feeling the same fluttering of pride that he'd seen shining in Spar's eyes: pride in one's own being and one's own fulfillment of a duty they took upon themselves gladly. "I am an Advance Recon Commando of the Grand Army of the Republic, just as I was when I came into these quarters."

Spar nodded again. "So be it, Advance Recon Commando." The blaster disappeared from the edge of the desk, vanished beneath it. "You have your path. I have mine." And Cygnus knew that they were still brothers, for they still thought alike.

"Promise me one thing, _tat_ Mandalore," he said, using Spar's self-assumed title for the first time as simply as if it were his (also self-assumed) name.

He didn't respond, but his expression calmly invited him to continue.

"Promise me that you will not threaten or hurt the Republic. Promise me, on the love of free will, that I will not have shirked the duty I wish for myself in not killing you. Promise me that by leaving you here and unharmed, I will not be betraying or endangering the Republic…or my principles."

Spar did not even hesitate. "Of course, _tat_ Cygnus," he acceded. "I will not condone nor order any remonstrations against the Republic while it stands as the Republic."

He froze. "What does that mean?"

"That means that you get what you wanted," he said calmly, "and more besides."

"I do not understand."

"I hope that you never do."

Cygnus was seized again by the sudden notion of just doing the thing that he'd been ordered to and finishing Spar, but he knew that as the one thing he could not allow himself to do before he could even think it. He had Spar's word - he thought - and his cryptic lunacy could not be haggled over. He grunted acceptance, turned to go -

"Wait one moment, _tat_," said Spar's cultured voice behind him.

He turned back grudgingly. "Aye, what is it?"

"Take off your helmet," he said curiously. "I want to see your face."

Cygnus laughed harshly. "It's the same as yours! Not much to see."

"I disagree," said Spar softly. "Take off your helmet, _tat_ Cygnus. It would be the highest salute you could pay me."

His helmet was a solid centimeter of blaster-resistant Mandalorian iron between his head and the potential threats of the world outside. If Spar was playing some grand dupe, he could have a blaster bolt between his eyes as soon as the helmet was removed.

But he had to trust that Spar thought as he did, for they were brothers. He had to trust that Spar was an honorable Mandalorian worthy of the legacy of his forerunners.

Slowly, with both hands, he reached up and removed the helmet. Spar watched, an unreadable look on his face, as if he was seeing something that Cygnus thought that he could not. At last, Spar said of the helmet, "Keep it. The rest, I would like back."

"You expect me to walk out of here without any disguise on at all?" he said in disbelief.

"They won't harm you," Spar assured him. "Now," he continued, rising from his seat, "I have a set of armor that I have no use for any longer. It might fit you." He winked at Cygnus; the signal seemed strange and out of place on the face of an ARC trooper.

Spar crossed the room and pressed a button on the side of a cabinet. Its doors slid open, revealing a stack of white Advance Recon Commando trooper armor and a neatly folded color-coded kama beside it.

"All yours, _tat_ Cygnus," he said, gesturing.

Without a worry as to whether this was a trick of the rogue soldier's playing, Cygnus stripped out of the heavy iron armor down to his black, Republic-issue jumpsuit and stepped over to the cabinet. It felt irresistibly _right_ to dress himself again in the kit of the ARC trooper, shedding the falsehood of a disguise not meant for him. He fastened the kama on around the back of his legs and reached for the helmet, then stopped.

Spar gave him a quizzical smile, a flash of which Cygnus allowed himself to return.

"No," he said. "You keep that bucket, to remind you. That was your identity."

Spar still smiled. "You speak in the past tense."

"My meaning is in the past tense."

He laughed and nodded, not just in acceptance but in approval. "Still sharp. Tell you what: you keep that helmet, and I keep this one," he said, indicating for himself the trooper helm still in his cabinet.

"To remember," said Cygnus softly.

"Yes," Spar agreed. "To remember."

They walked to the door, one clone trooper in the armor of his kind with the helmet of a Mandalorian warrior tucked beneath his arm, one Mandalorian clad only in a jumpsuit stamped with the fanged-skull crest of his clan, both identical, both brothers. Cygnus pressed the button to open it, and willfully the door obeyed.

The guards outside saw him and started, reaching for their weapons, but Spar smiled and raised both hands, stopping them. "He's to be allowed safe passage from here," he said in Mandalorian; Cygnus understood the gist of his words. He was being looked upon with sudden respect, a respect that only intensified with Spar's next words: "I will not allow harm to come to him from you, for he is the kin of Mandalore."


End file.
